Xerox management also failed to agree on objectives and strategies that would help the company achieve success. Allaire and Thoman did agree that the Xerox brand needed a makeover in order to succeed in the Digital Age. The problem for Xerox was that the two did not agree on the steps that needed to be taken to reinvent the company. Thoman believed that Xerox needed to change its business strategy. He felt that the company needed to focus on selling output management solutions to large companies. To complete this task, Xerox would have to shift its sales focus from selling hardware to selling output management solutions. Thoman thought this change in strategy would promote productivity, but instead, productivity dropped and company moral continued its decline. Changing the business strategy did not work because Xerox was a company so fixed on operating as it always had. Senior managers hired Thoman because they liked the idea of change, in theory, but in practice the company was very entrenched in its old ways. A former Xerox executive confirmed the company’s resistance to change by saying: “Xerox has been far better at proclaiming the need for change than actually making change. There was always a huge gap between the visionary aspirations the company was nominally pursuing and what it actually drove employees to do.”

Although the main cause of Xerox’s downfall was ineffective management, many other problems surfaced for the company. These problems were only compounded by the fact that there was not a stable management force to deal with these difficulties in an appropriate manner. Xerox’s financial operations were plagued by corruption and the company suffered great financial loss. Thirteen individuals employed at Xerox’s Mexican subsidiary were fired after they were accused of conducting accounting operations inappropriately in order to make the unit’s performance appear better than it actually was. Also, the company lost 13%, or $1 billion, of its net worth because of foreign currency losses, mostly in Brazil. “Analysts were stunned that Xerox would have left such a big chunk of its equity exposed to the vagaries of the notoriously volatile Brazilian economy.” The company’s stock price went from hitting a record high at $64 a share in May of 1999, to hitting a record low as it currently trades at about $7 a share. “The evisceration of $38 billion in shareholder wealth already qualifies Xerox as a corporate catastrophe of the first order.” The financial troubles that the company endured only added to the internal tension building up between the two groups of upper executives.

Thoman never got the opportunity to reinvent the Xerox Company in the way that he had intended. Thoman, for example, wanted to fire the company’s CFO, Barry Romeril, but Allaire advised him that the board would not approve if he were to do so. Xerox’s financial troubles were a clear indication that Romeril was not fulfilling his job requirements, but he was a protected Xerox insider because of his close relationship with Allaire. When Thoman became CEO, Allaire offered senior management executives Barry Romeril and William Buehler positions on the board and gave them both the title of vice-chairman. It is no coincidence that these men were two of Allaire’s closest friends. A company’s management team must be able to separate personal matt

Some topics in this essay:
Xerox’s Mexican, Rick Thoman, Document Center, Age Xerox, Using Allaire, Xerox Managers, William Buehler, Richard Thoman, Unfortunately Thoman, Hewlett-Packard Co, xerox management, xerox company, plans change, xerox insiders, machines document center, management solutions, output management, change agent, motivate employees, allaire board, selling output management, output management solutions, chairman board,